Taking Liberties (42 page)

 
Dr Whalley, the new surgeon, finished setting the splintered bones in de Vaubon's leg. It was a relief to everybody. The Frenchman had spat out the bullet they'd given him to bite on and followed it with every swear word in the French language, as well as some that weren't, in a voice that dislodged sparrows from the rafters.

Bosun Tilley and one of the orderlies let go of his arms, rubbing their bruises.

Makepeace followed the doctor to the sink and gave him a towel. ‘What he called you,' she said, ‘he didn't mean it.'

Dr Whalley dried his hands. ‘I hope not. My mother was a most respectable woman.'

‘Will he be all right?'

‘It'll never be the leg it was, always give him pain. But if you're asking me if he'll live, then, ma'am, I tell you that to kill that gentleman will require a poleaxe.'

Later in the day, Captain Stewart made his rounds on what was now a regular tour of inspection by the camp commander—something Bosun Tilley insisted on. When he went into the Frenchman's bay, Makepeace loitered outside the curtain.

‘Monsewer le cappytaine, I am empowered to offer you parole if you will give me your word that you will not attempt to escape.'

Makepeace heard a weak but definite, ‘No.'

‘I don't think you understand, Captain. Give me your word and we can find you comfortable accommodation in the town. You may go where you please—within limits.'

‘You prefer to stay in prison?'

There was a growl. ‘
Fous-moi la paix
.'

Captain Stewart emerged with Bosun Tilley. ‘That's rather rude, isn't it?'

Tilley was protective of his patients. ‘He's in pain, sir.'

When they'd gone, Makepeace slipped inside. ‘You meathead,' she said. ‘Why don't you give your parole?'

De Vaubon focused on her with difficulty. ‘You,' he said. ‘I thought you a spirit. Is she here?'

‘No, she's back at Babbs Cove.'

‘I dream of her. Very much.'

Makepeace smiled. ‘She'll be glad to hear it.'

He kept going in and out of sleep, taking what she said with him and only responding to it later. He asked: ‘Did Bilo survive? Mathurin? Félix?'

‘Bilo's up the other end of the ward,' she told him, ‘I don't know about the others.'

‘I remember, they are dead. My brave boys.' He tried to cross himself. ‘God be good to them. If there is a God.'

She didn't have time to argue theology. She put her mouth close to his ear. ‘They're digging a tunnel. You'll be back in France before you know it.'

He drifted off again, uninterested. The wound on his face was terrible; he'd been lucky not to lose an eye and if the split eyelid didn't heal well his face would be something to frighten naughty children with—whoever had stitched it possessed the needlework skill of a butcher.

His good eye opened as he came to again. ‘So we escape?'

‘Be easier if you gave your parole.'

‘I could not keep it. It would be against my honour. I have to escape.'

‘She said you didn't believe in honour. You told her it was rubbish.'

He shook his head with the irritation of fatigue. ‘I do not break my word. You do not understand, you are a woman.' He relapsed into unconsciousness again.

She stood for a moment looking down at the gargoyle that had been made out of his face.
Honour
. He'd cut down one man, and fired on the Royal Navy ship that had fired on his, killing more. Every patient in this ward had left a trail of blood behind him: his own, his enemy's. She could not, and never did, forget that for each man in Millbay and all the other prisons, British sailors had either risked their lives, or lost them, attempting to put him there.

And out of this unruled, mangling, burning, screaming savagery, they plucked one civilized splinter and sanctified it and called it honour and said women would not understand it.

And they were right.

 
Lark
and
Three Cousins
came home in dawn light and weather that would have prevented any other boat getting into the cove at all. To the Dowager and all the other watching women, it seemed that they were tossed in, one after the other, as if they were not heavily laden vessels but rings in a giant game of quoits.

The collective sigh of thanks around her was whipped away in the wind. Diana found her own palms sweating and rubbed them on her handkerchief. ‘That was lucky.'

‘That were seamanship,' Zack said. ‘Still, they'll never get the goods ashore in this blow. Us'll have to tub 'em.' He went and joined the parties of women who were pushing rowing boats into the surf to go and fetch their men ashore—a manoeuvre that seemed as risky to Diana as the one made by the bigger vessels. She watched the boats tip almost vertically to breast the grey-green waves before disappearing into a trough and rising again.

‘Tub them?' she asked Philippa who stood beside her, the wind blowing her long, straight hair.

Philippa said primly: ‘They weight the contraband and throw it overboard attached to a line that's got a lobster-pot on the end or something else that floats. Then they can pull it up when the weather's cleared or the Revenue's not around. They call it “tubbing”. '

Such an extraordinary child. ‘How
do
you know all this?'

‘Mama told me. It's what the smugglers she knew in Boston did when she was a girl. She calls it “sowing the crop”.'

‘Your mother never ceases to amaze me.'

‘Picking them up is Ralph Gurney's end of the business, I understand. He brings different men to do it and they take the tubs away on ponies. Jan and Eddie just fetch the contraband from France.'

‘I hope one of those boats has your stepfather in it, for your mother's sake.'

‘So do I. I should like to see him again.'

Jenny and Sally were agitating to ‘go and see the big boats with Zack', and were taken back inside.

There was no Andra but there was a letter from him addressed to ‘Mrs Makepeace Hedley of Babbs Cove, Devon, England'.

‘Waitin' for us at Gruchy, it was,' Jan Gurney said, as the village gathered in the Pomeroy Arms to hear the news from abroad. ‘Gil's man took the Missus's letter to Paris and brought this 'un back.' He poured water out of his sea boot onto the floor before taking a pull at the largest tankard of ale the Dowager had ever seen.

Eddie Gurney stretched and winked at his wife, Cissy. ‘Time we went home for a liddle rest, my 'andsome.' She blushed. Eddie was the youngest of the Gurney cousins and as swarthy and black-haired as Ralph and Jan were blond. It was a phenomenon that cropped up in the village here and there; the Dowager had noticed it particularly among the children: an occasional black poppy in a cluster of daisy-heads. She had approached the matter delicately to Mrs Hallewell, suspecting scandal.

‘Oh, that were the Armada,' Mrs Hallewell had said, comfortably. ‘They do say a Spaniard swam ashore from one o' the wrecks. Did terrible damage among the womenfolk 'fore they caught 'un.'

Jan Gurney was telling Eddie not to rest too long. ‘We'll need to get that mizzen fixed before us can go out again.'

Rachel, his wife, a tall and handsome young woman, said: ‘You're never settin' out again so soon, Jan Gurney.'

‘Got to while this dang wind lasts and the Revenue stays in harbour. '

As the Babbs Cove boats had been leaving the Normandy coast, they'd encountered the
Eliza
out of Thurlestone going in and had stopped to exchange information with their fellow-smugglers like two women chatting over a garden fence. ‘Tom Kitto, he said as how the Nicholls have got a new vessel, a cutter. Very speedy, Tom says she is. I don't want to meet her one fine night when the hold's full. Her's patrolling from Cawsand to Bolt Head, Tom says.'

‘Might you not meet her anyway?' Philippa asked.

‘Not her, my lover, not in this blow. Preventives ain't got the stomach for foul weather. You'll not see them venturing out to get their wigs wet.'

The Dowager hoped he was right but Nicholls had not struck her as a coward. ‘Did you meet M. de Vaubon at Gruchy?' she asked casually.

He shook his head. ‘Gil's away to the war. God keep 'un.'

When, late that night, Sanders pulled up his team outside the Pomeroy Arms, Philippa was waiting at the door to hand her mother the letter.

The Dowager thought she had never seen either woman, Dell or Makepeace, look so tired. Even Tobias made for a chair, the first time he'd sat down in her presence.

‘Well, we're done now,' Dell said, taking the hot rum Philippa held out to her. ‘The Bosun's finished with us.'

Tilley had enquired among old shipmates and found damaged sailors who, now their usefulness to the Royal Navy was over, were happy to serve on half-pay in any capacity rather than disappear into the pensionless void that usually awaited Britain's non-commissioned servicemen.

‘Ye never saw such a patched-up lot of fellas,' Dell said. ‘One had only one arm and at least two lacked an eye but wasn't your man happy with them.'

‘We'll make shift now,' Bosun Tilley had told Makepeace. ‘Don't need you no more.'

‘
Thank you very much
,' she'd reminded him, sharply.

‘Yes, well,' he'd said. ‘Won't say you wasn't useful but it never was right, women nursing sailors.'

Makepeace was reading Andra's letter and pretending irritation with it. ‘Him and Lavoisier are weighing air—how can you weigh air?—and he can't come right away but . . . listen to this: “I'll pack my traps soon and be at Gruchy the next time the gentlemen call in there.” As if it was a damn ferry they're running back and forth. Oh, and he's relieved and pleased that Philippa has been delivered to me safe—she's not a parcel, you meathead—but condoles with me on the death of Miss Brewer. He writes like we never met before.'

She read the next page but kept it to herself, some colour coming back into her face. ‘ “From your loving husband, A. J. Hedley.” Damn the man, he always puts that, as if I don't know who he is.'

She clutched the letter to her chest and looked round at the company. ‘Just wait 'til he gets back, that's all I can say. I'll give him A. J. Hedley.'

To the Dowager, she said: ‘Oh, and there's something for ladyship. ' She pulled a carefully rolled piece of paper from the pocket of her cloak and held out Josh's drawing of Forrest Grayle.

Diana looked at it for a long time.

‘I thought you might want to send that to his ma,' Makepeace said. ‘See? Josh has given him back his hands.'

 
Lark
and
Three Cousins
put out again and were lost to sight almost immediately in heavy sea and black, scudding cloud.

Ginny became worried that the weather would delay her and the girls' return to Northumbria. Makepeace did too; she would have liked to keep her daughters at Babbs Cove but dare not have them with her should Josh's escape miscarry and involve them all in trouble with the authorities.

‘Why don't you spend a week with them in Exeter?' Philippa suggested. ‘See the sights, visit the castle and the cathedral. I am told they are most interesting. Then Aunt Ginny can take them in the mail coach from there to London and on up North. You could go shopping with the girls—they are already grown out of their clothes.'

Makepeace was doubtful at first but Philippa was persuasive. ‘You have spent so little time with them, Mama, and it will take your mind off things. I shall stay here in case Andra returns before you do. Dell will be here and Ladyship will look after me, won't you, your ladyship?'

It was arranged. Sanders drove them away the next morning.

‘I didn't think we'd persuade her,' Philippa said, waving them off.

‘Even she knows she is in need of a change and a rest.'

‘It will be a change,' said Philippa. ‘I don't think Sally and Jenny will make it a rest.'

Diana moved into the Pomeroy rather than treat Dell and Philippa to the discomforts of T'Gallants—but regretted it the same afternoon.

‘ 'Fraid so, ladyship,' Ralph Gurney said. ‘Conditions is perfect. Sea's calmed some, there'll be moon enough to see by but not
be
seen. And these lads here have come along the cliffs without a sniff of a coastguard. No, we got to raise them tubs right away.'

‘These lads' were as grim a crowd of men as were likely to be seen outside Newgate. There were forty of them, some carrying heavy cudgels. It didn't ease the Dowager's mind to find that these last were referred to as ‘batsmen' and their job was to engage and belabour any customs men they met while their companions got away.

‘Very well, Mr Gurney, but I don't want these men inside the Pomeroy; we are only women here.'

She had sent Tobias to Plymouth to post another batch of letters to newspapers and the various sympathetic organizations with whom she now corresponded on the matter of the Americans' exchange, and she didn't count old Zack and Simeon as protection.

It was dark by the time the contraband had been landed on the beach. Some of the village women went to help the men and brought the laden ponies up the slipway, pausing in the light from the Pomeroy's windows to adjust girths and the ropes that held the tubs in place. The crammed forecourt smelled of horse manure, wet, sweating men, brandy—one of the tubs had been broached ‘to keep out the cold'—and, of all things, soap.

‘Why are the women soaping the ponies?'